The secret to addiction

Addiction has gotten a bad rap for most of my life. I grew up decades into a pointless war on drugs which were based on complete lies about addiction, e.g. a certain substance was inherently addictive because of the substance, not the person. 

Today, the drugs have been replaced by arguably something worse: Social media, quick dopamine hits, and short videos that offer you just enough escapism (or, in some cases, education) to scroll mindlessly to the next video until you realize you’ve been doomscrolling for longer than the runtime of The Irishman. 

It’s absolutely demolished attention spans to the tune of Netflix’s overlords now create their content as “second-screen content,” which means that it’s on in the background as their customers doomscroll on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or any other social media company with enough data to actively addict you to its content. 

But not all addiction is bad. 

And it’s possible to make your fans addicted to, well, you. 

Nothing can ratchet up your sales and influence like having supporters addicted to you. And when you do this in an ethical and helpful way, then, well, you’re actively helping your fans. 

So, how do you get people addicted to you?

It’s simple, but it ain’t easy. 

All it takes is consistency and creativity. 

The more consistent you are, the deeper someone falls into the “rabbit hole” of you. 

Take, for example, my favorite band, Goose. 

Their marketing is top-notch and something that a lot of business owners, if’n they knew about them, would be jealous about. Their marketing is at least part of the reason for their explosion over the past five years, from playing small-time bars with a few people in the audience to headlining (and selling out) Madison Square Garden by themselves. 

But they have a secret to their marketing too: 

They add each of their live shows to an app called nugs.net. And it does the “grunt work” of their marketing in a similar way that email does for an online business:

It sells them as a band. Their audience gets them to spend more time with them, making them feel like they know each member (even if they’ve only ever communicated via music). Just like email. 

And they add just about every show they’ve played live from 2019 until now (as I write this in 2025). 

There’s a seemingly never-ending “rabbit hole” of Goose you can dive into. And the cool thing about jam bands is that the more you listen to them, the better they become to you. It’s like magic. 

And you know what?

So it is when you email daily. 

Even people who get annoyed with the volume will slowly warm up to you. 

And once they warm up to you?

That’s where their addiction starts. Each email you send them afterward becomes another hit until they can’t help themselves but to buy everything you offer. 

And if your offers actually help them (as they should)? 

Then, well, you’ve leveraged humanity’s weird fixation with addiction to not only profit yourself, but to enhance the lives of your fans. 

Much better than drugs or social media or food or anything worse they’d get addicted to. 

Some food for thought. 

Need help with this process?

Hit reply. 

But leave your expectations at the door:

It could take years to properly addict your audience to you. 

And, of course, I can’t control what you do with this info, but I can plead with you to do it in an ethical and moral way. 

John